The soil was poor in minerals—a fact that would write much economic and political history in Italy. There was no gold and little silver; there was a fair supply of iron, some copper, lead, tin, and zinc, but too scarce to support an industrial development. The state owned all mines in the empire, but leased them to private operators, who worked them profitably by using up the lives of thousands of slaves. Metallurgy and technology made few advances. Bronze was still employed more frequently than iron, and only the best and latest mines were equipped with the winches, windlasses, and chain buckets that Archimedes and others had set up in Sicily and Egypt. The chief fuel was wood; trees were cut also for houses and ships and furniture; mile by mile, decade by decade, the forest retreated up the mountainside to meet the timber line. The most prosperous industry was the manufacture of weapons and tools in Campania. There was no factory system, except for armament and pottery. Potters made not only dishes but bricks and tiles, conduits and pipes; at Arretium and elsewhere the potters were copying Greek models and learning to make artistic wares. As early as the sixth century the textile industry, in the design, preparation, and dyeing of linen and wool, had grown beyond the domestic stage despite the busy spinning of daughters, wives, and slaves; free and unfree weavers were brought together in small factories, which produced not only for the local market but also for export trade.
Industrial production for nonlocal consumption was arrested by difficulties of transport. Roads were poor, bridges unsafe, oxcarts slow, inns rare, robbers plentiful. Hence traffic moved by choice along canals and rivers, while coastal towns imported by sea rather than from their hinterland. By 202, however, the Romans had built three of their great “consular roads”—so called because usually named after the consuls or censors who began them. Soon these highways would far surpass in durability and extent the Persian and Carthaginian roads that had served them as models. The oldest of them was the via Latina which, about 370 B.C., brought Romans out to the Alban hills. In 312 Appius Claudius the Blind, with the labor of thousands of criminals,55 started the via Appia, or Appian Way, between Rome and Capua; later it reached out to Beneventum, Venusia, Brundisium, and Tarentum; its 333 English miles bound the two coasts, eased trade with Greece and the East, and collaborated with the other roads to make Italy one nation. In 241 the censor Aurelius Cotta began the Aurelian Way from Rome through Pisa and Genoa to Antibes. Caius Flaminius in 220 opened the Flaminian Way to Ariminum; and about the same time the Valerian Way connected Tibur with Corfinium. Slowly the majestic network grew: the Aemilian Way climbed north from Ariminum through Bononia and Mutina to Placentia (187); the Postumian Way linked Genoa with Verona (148); and the via Popilia led from Ariminum through Ravenna to Padua (132). In the following century roads would dart out from Italy to York, Vienna, Thessalonica, and Damascus, and would line the north African coast. They defended, unified, and vitalized the Empire by quickening the movement of troops, intelligence, customs, and ideas; they became great channels of commerce, and played no minor role in the peopling and enrichment of Italy and Europe.
Despite these highways, trade never flourished in Italy as in the eastern Mediterranean. The upper classes looked with contempt upon buying cheap and selling dear, and left trade to Greek and Oriental freedmen; while the countryside contented itself with occasional fairs, and “ninth-day” markets in the towns. Foreign commerce was similarly moderate. Sea transport was risky; ships were small, made only six miles an hour sailing or rowing, hugged the coast, and for the most part kept timidly in port from November to March. Carthage controlled the western Mediterranean, the Hellenistic monarchies controlled the east, and pirates periodically swept out of their lairs upon merchants relatively more honest than themselves. The Tiber was perpetually silting its mouth and blocking Rome’s port at Ostia; two hundred vessels foundered there in one gale; besides, the current was so strong that the voyage upstream to Rome hardly repaid the labor and the cost. About 200 B.C.. vessels began to put in at Puteoli, 150 miles south of Rome, and ship their goods overland to the capital.
To facilitate this external and internal trade it became necessary to establish a state-guaranteed system of coinage, measures, and weights.III Till the fourth century B.C. cattle were still accepted as a medium of exchange, since they were universally valuable and easily moved. As trade grew, rude chunks of copper (aes) were used as money (ca. 330 B.C.); estimate was originally aes tumare, to value copper. The unit of value was the as (one)—i.e., one pound of copper by weight; ex-pend meant weighed out. When, about 338 B.C., a copper coinage was issued by the state, it often bore the image of an ox, a sheep, or a hog, and was accordingly called pecunia (pecus, cattle). In the First Punic War, says Pliny, “the Republic, not having means to meet its needs, reduced the as to two ounces of copper; by this contrivance a saving of five sixths was effected, and the public debt was liquidated.”56 By 202 the as had fallen to an ounce; and in 87 B.C. it was reduced to half an ounce to help finance the Social War. In 269 two silver coins were minted: the denarius, equal to ten asses, and corresponding to the Athenian drachma in the latter’s depreciated Hellenistic form; and the sestertius, representing two and a half asses, or a quarter of a denarius. In 217 appeared the first Roman gold coins—the aurei—with values of twenty, forty, and sixty sesterces. In metallic equivalence the as would equal two, the sesterce five, the denarius twenty, cents in the currency of the United States; but as precious metals were much less plentiful than now, and therefore had a purchasing power several times greater than today,57 we shall, ignoring price fluctuations before Nero, roughly equate the as, sesterce, denarius, and talent (6000 denarii) of the Roman Republic with six, fifteen, and sixty cents, and $3600 respectively, in terms of United States currency in 1942.IV
The issuance of this guaranteed currency promoted the profession and operations of finance. The older Romans used temples as their banks, as we use banks as our temples; and the state continued to the end to use its strongly built shrines as repositories for public funds, perhaps on the theory that religious scruples would help discourage robbery. Moneylending was an old business, for the Twelve Tables had forbidden interest above eight and one third per cent per annum.60 The legal rate was lowered to five per cent in 347, and to zero in 342, but this Aristotelian prohibition was so easily evaded that the actual minimum rate averaged twelve per cent. Usury (above twelve per cent) was widespread, and debtors had periodically to be rescued from their accumulating obligations by bankruptcy or legislation. In 352 B.C. the government used a very modern method of relief: it took over such mortgages as offered a fair chance of repayment, and persuaded mortgagees to accept a lower interest rate on the others.61 One of the streets adjoining the Forum became a banker’s row, crowded with the shops of the moneylenders (argentarii) and money-changers (trapezitae). Money could be borrowed on land, crops, securities, or government contracts, and for financing commercial enterprises or voyages. Co-operative lending took the place of industrial insurance; instead of one banker completely underwriting a venture, several joined in providing the funds. Joint-stock companies existed chiefly for the performance of government contracts let out on bids by the censor; they raised their capital by selling their stocks or bonds to the public in the form of partes or particulae—“little parts,” shares. These companies of “publicans”—i.e., men engaged on public or state undertakings—played an active role in supplying and transporting materials for the army and navy in the Second Punic War—not without the usual attempts to cheat the government.62 Businessmen (equites) directed the larger of these enterprises, freedmen the smaller. Nongovernmental business was carried on by negotiatores, who usually provided their own funds.
Industry was in the hands of independent craftsmen, working in their separate shops. Most such men were freemen, but an increasing proportion were freedmen or slaves. Labor was highly differentiated, and produced for the market rather than for the individual customer. Competition by slaves depressed the wages of free workers, and reduced the proletariat to a bitter life in slums. Strikes among these men were impracticable and rare,63 but slave uprisings were frequent; the “First Servile War” (139 B.C.) was not the first. When public discontent became acute, some cause could be found for a war that would provide universal employment, spread depreciated money, and turn the wrath of the people against a foreign foe whose lands would feed the Roman people victorious, or receive them defeated and dead.64 The free workers had unions or guilds (collegia), but these seldom concerned themselves with wages, hours, or conditions of labor. Tradition credited Numa with having established or legalized them; in any case, the seventh century B.C. had organizations of flute players, goldsmiths, coppersmiths, fullers, shoemakers, potters, dyers, and carpenters.65 The “Dionysian Artists”—actors and musicians—were among the most widespread associations in the ancient world. By the second century B.C. we find guilds of cooks, tanners, builders, bronzeworkers, ironworkers, ropemakers, weavers; but these were probably as old as the others. The chief aim of such unions was the simple pleasure of social intercourse; many of them were also mutual-benefit societies to defray the cost of funerals.
The state regulated not only the guilds, but many aspects of Rome’s economic life. It supervised the operation of mines and other governmental concessions or contracts. It quieted agitation among the plebs by importing food and distributing it at nominal prices to the poor or to all applicants. It levied fines upon monopolists, and it nationalized the salt industry to end a monopoly that had raised the price of salt beyond the reach of the working class. Its commercial policy was liberal: after overcoming Carthage it opened the western Mediterranean to all trade; and it protected Utica and, later, Delos on condition that they remain free ports, permitting the entry and exit of goods without fee. At various times, however, it forbade the export of arms, iron, wine, oil, or cereals; it laid a customs duty, usually of two and a half per cent, upon the entry of most products into Rome, and afterward extended this modest tariff to other cities. Until 147 B.C. it required a tributum, or property tax, throughout Italy. All in all, its revenues were modest; and like other civilized states it used them chiefly for war.66